Newsroom and The West Wing

The Main Cast of The Newsroom HBO

Several years ago, not sure how many--maybe it was 1999 when my niece began boarding at Choate Rosemary Hall and would stay with me during some of her holidays in our family apartment in New York on 145th Street in Harlem (the apartment that the celebrated jazz singer Dinah Washington owned and which my Mom Faith Ringgold now owns).  We had three televisions, all with cable--of which I was enormously proud. The West Wing by Aaron Sorkin (1998-2006), which I had never heard of or seen, was running simultaneously on re-runs on a dizzying variety of stations, and it appeared to my addled almost fifty year old brain that it was pretty continuously on the air at all times. Yet what I saw over her shoulder as her eyes would wander back to the screen was not the mixture of violence, melodrama and sex that I had learned to expect from highly re-run shows. Rather what even I could see despite all endeavors to ignore it was well suited people (by which I am referring to their clothing) walking up and down hallways, in what I later found out was the West Wing, frantically and heatedly debating a variety of subjects, none of which made any sense to me at the time.  The main thing was that this show was political--it wasn't quite the fashion that it has become--it starred Martin Sheen who I consider to be a serious person who only gets involved in serious projects, and I had previously had a lot of respect for my niece's cinematic taste.  Afterall I had been watching art films and third world films with subtitles with her since she was knee high to a grasshopper.  So what was this West Wing?

Of course, I fell deeply in love with West Wing, and continue to miss that level of engagement on television.  Not Scandal nor any of the rich BBC fare can begin to equal it for intensity and excitement from an intellectual standpoint.  It was my primer for awhile on presidential politics.  I used it to educate myself about what went on in the executive branch.

Now we have Newsroom produced by HBO also written by Aaron Sorkin.  Again we are looking at something that is heavily scripted except this time the target is life at a cable news outfit.  Again we encounter people who live for their job because they are smart and dedicated and young, and most importantly their jobs seem desperately important. That job is to figure out what the story is, to distinguish the truth from what might be most convenient for ratings and advertising, which is more of a problem than one might have imagined.  Perhaps more of a problem than when the news was something broadcast on television one hour in the evening on three networks--the anchors were white, the news was in black and white, and there were all sorts of subject matter having to do with sex and race and culture and class that were totally off limits--making it I think a simpler if not kinder job.

On the other hand, Newsroom which has recently concluded its second season, is dealing with a news environment complicated by the internet, cell phones, tweets, texts, and facebook, as well as a news and entertainment media horribly split between far too many masters and concerns.  How does it make this happen? It sticks with stories that are several years old--stories for which we know more or less some of the outcomes and a little bit about what turned out to be true--and then it presents the tensions and pressures on the media to report the lies.

As is typical with Sorkin as well, the music is fantastic.  This was true on West Wing too.  Will never forget the episode of Martin Sheen in the situation room in some awful star wars scenario in which there was no right and no wrong, and everything was wrong.  They played it against a magnificent song I discovered is included in the satellite capsule to tell the world who and what we were a thousands years from now. Blind Lemon Johnson, an extraordinary artist who sang gospel with the damnest blues flair that could be mustered.  In this case, this is a song that was so well known at the time that instead of singing it, he hummed it.  And he nailed it.  It is the saddest most beautiful sound ever recorded almost, apart from some rare African music I have heard. 

The scenario in Episode 3 of the First Season culminates in the shooting of Congressman Cathy Gifford.  As is typical with high profile shootings, the pressure is on to pronounce her dead on the air and the Newsroom crew withstand the pressure to establish the facts, which is, as we all know now, she isn't dead.

In the scene, one of the upstairs money-types comes running onto the floor of the newsroom demanding to know why the host hasn't called her as dead:

The suit from upstairs (the son of the owner, which is Jane Fonda, by the way) says, "Every second you are not current, a thousand people are changing the channel to the guy who is. That's the business you're in.  "MSNBC, CBS And FOX NPR have all said she is dead. Don tell him" (he shouts to the guy he expects to side with him).

Don says, gravely,  "It's a person.  A doctor pronounces her dead, not the news," with fabulous intense music in the background.  It's special. We care. Meanwhile evil corporate interests continue to finangle and pull strings to prevent the American people from coming within a thousand miles of the news they need to conduct their lives.